[lbo-talk] Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus

[Michael Pugliese]

<URL: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/d- 
titles/derluguian_secret_admirer.shtml >
Derluguian is always a great read in NLR. Has a piece in the latest 
Socialist Register,  "How Soviet Bureaucracy Produced Nationalism, and what 
came of it in Azerbaijan." In a chance encounter with the author, Musa 
Shanib—a prominent figure in Chechnya’s revolution and commander of 
volunteer brigades in Abkhazia’s war of independence from Georgia—confided 
that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology was the second major influence in his life 
after the Qur’an. How did a dissident intellectual become a nationalist 
warlord rather than a liberal reformer like Vaclav Havel?

In attempting to answer this question, Georgi Derluguian both 
contextualizes and interprets Shanib’s personal trajectory from de- 
Stalinization after 1956, through the nationalist rebellions of the 1990s, 
to the most recent rise in Islamic militancy. Offering an inventive 
combination of conceptual tools developed by Wallerstein, Tilly, and 
Bourdieu, Derluguian successfully challenges the prevalent picture of 
globalization and terrorist reaction by analysing, in substantive empirical 
detail, the actual patterns of neo-patrimonial capitalism and ethnic 
networks that have emerged in the ruins of the Soviet state.

“Derluguian is endowed with a special ability to show how the grinding 
wheels of world history affect actual human lives.” — William H. McNeill, 
author of Plagues and Peoples and Pursuit of Power

“As good an overview as one could find.” — S. Frederick Starr, chair of the 
Central Asia-Caucusus Institute, Johns Hopkins University

“A very beautiful text.” — Pierre Bourdieu

Georgi Derluguian is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. His 
most recent publications include “The Politics of Identity in a Russian 
Borderland Province” and “Ukraine and the IVth Russian Empire”.
-- 
Michael Pugliese